Beethoven was a genius so universal that his popularity, extraordinary even during his lifetime, has never ceased to grow. It now encircles the globe: Beethoven's most famous works are as beloved in Beijing as they are in Boston. Biographer Morris brings the composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligence. A gigantic, compulsively creative personality unable to tolerate constraints, he was not so much a social rebel...

lluminates Beethoven's difficult childhood, his struggle to find a wife, his ungovernable temper, his emotional volatility, his tendency to push away those trying to help him, and in middle age his obsessive compulsion to control his nephew's life.

Chris, a film composer and widower, returns to the Yorkshire Dales to grieve his wife and write his piano sonata. He soon finds himself distracted, though, when he discovers that a murder was committed in his rented house by a woman who was one of the last women hanged in England.

Examines the life of eighteenth-century composer Ludwig van Beethoven, discussing his difficult childhood, early gift for music, volatile personality, hearing loss, and the influence of other composers on his work. Includes twenty-one related activities.

When Anna Kramer, a Los Alamos piano teacher, inherits the journals and scores of composer Hana Weissova, she is mystified by this bequest from a woman she does not know. Hana's music, however, soon begins to uncover forgotten emotions, while her journals, which begin in 1945 after she is released from a concentration camp, slowly reveal decades-old secrets that Anna and her family have kept buried. Dissonance is a quiet and dramatic novel that offers...